Chris Bertram

This article distinguishes between three methodologies for thinking about justice: principle-based, model-based and ‘realist’, concentrating mainly on the differences between the first two. Both model-based and realist approaches pride themselves on taking institutions seriously and argue that institutions make a fundamental difference to justice. This claim is at best not proven, and it may be possible to account for the difference that institutions make to what justice requires while retaining a non-institutional account of what justice is.

States claim the right to choose who can come to their country. They put up barriers and expose migrants to deadly journeys. Those who survive are labelled ‘illegal’ and find themselves vulnerable and unrepresented. The international state system advantages the lucky few born in rich countries and locks others into poor and often repressive ones. In this book, Christopher Bertram skilfully weaves a lucid exposition of the debates in political philosophy with original insights to argue that migration controls must be justifiable to everyone, including would-be and actual immigrants. Until justice prevails, states have no credible right to exclude and no-one is obliged to obey their immigration rules. Bertram’s analysis powerfully cuts through the fog of political rhetoric that obscures this controversial topic. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the politics and ethics of migration.

States claim the right to choose who can come to their country. They put up barriers and expose migrants to deadly journeys. Those who survive are labelled ‘illegal’ and find themselves vulnerable and unrepresented. The international state system advantages the lucky few born in rich countries and locks others into poor and often repressive ones. In this book, Christopher Bertram skilfully weaves a lucid exposition of the debates in political philosophy with original insights to argue that migration controls must be justifiable to everyone, including would-be and actual immigrants. Until justice prevails, states have no credible right to exclude and no-one is obliged to obey their immigration rules. Bertram’s analysis powerfully cuts through the fog of political rhetoric that obscures this controversial topic. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the politics and ethics of migration.

This paper looks at a recent challenge to the liberal inclusivist view that everyone on the state’s territory should have a path to citizenship. Economists have argued that giving immigrants an inferior legal status would persuade wealthy countries to admit more, with beneficial consequences for global justice. Whilst this trade-off might seem appealing from the impersonal perspective of the policymaker it generates incoherence from the perpective of the collective of democratic citizens, since it requires them to treat their own unjust attitudes as an objective constraint. The paper also rejects the idea that a voluntary choice to migrate can be taken as consent to an inferior status.

RESUMO:Os estudiosos vêm se dividindo acirradamente sobre a relevância da política e da história de Genebra na filosofia política de Rousseau. Eu busco chegar a uma visão coerente do compromisso de Rousseau com Genebra, uma que rejeita tanto a ideia de que ela é simplesmente irrelevante ao núcleo das doutrinas políticas do autor, quanto a que essencialmente lê tudo como uma intervenção na política genebrina. Nenhuma dessas concepções parece correta. De fato, Genebra, como Rousseau a concebeu, é uma presença constante que informa seu pensamento de modos diferentes. Rousseau não foi tão ingênuo a ponto de pensar que Genebra encarnava seus princípios, mas também não viu a verdadeira natureza da cidade como uma oligarquia hereditária. Ele a julgou defeituosa, porém remediável, uma avaliação talvez marcada pela aversão ao conflito civil, ao menos até que a realidade genebrina colidisse com suas ilusões. ABSTRACT:Scholars have been sharply divided over the relevance of Genevan politics and history to Rousseau’s political philosophy. In this article, I try to achieve a coherent view of Rousseau’s engagement with Geneva, one that rejects the idea that Geneva is simply irrelevant to his core political doctrines, but that also rejects the view that essentially reads everything as a political intervention in Genevan politics. Neither of these views seem accurate. Rather, Geneva is a constant presence that informs his thinking in different ways. Rousseau was not so naive as to think that Geneva incarnated his principles, but neither did he see its true nature as a hereditary oligarchy. He judged it flawed but remediable, a judgement perhaps informed by a loathing of civil conflict, at least until Genevan reality collided with his illusions.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains an important figure in the history of philosophy, both because of his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology and because of his influence on later thinkers. Rousseau's own view of philosophy and philosophers was firmly negative, seeing philosophers as the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity's natural impulse to compassion. The concern that dominates Rousseau's work is to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world where human beings are increasingly dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs. This concern has two dimensions: material and psychological, of which the latter has greater importance. In the modern world, human beings come to derive their very sense of self from the opinion of others, a fact which Rousseau sees as corrosive of freedom and destructive of individual authenticity. In his mature work, he principally explores two routes to achieving and protecting freedom: the first is a political one aimed at constructing political institutions that allow for the co-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where they themselves are sovereign; the second is a project for child development and education that fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest. However, though Rousseau believes the co-existence of human beings in relations of equality and freedom is possible, he is consistently and overwhelmingly pessimistic that humanity will escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom. In addition to his contributions to philosophy, Rousseau was active as a composer and a music theorist, as the pioneer of modern..

Liberal egalitarian political philosophers have often argued that private property is a legal convention dependent on the state and that complaints about taxation from entitlement theorists are therefore based on a conceptual mistake. But our capacity to grasp and use property concepts seems too embedded in human nature for this to be correct. This essay argues that many standard arguments that property is constitutively a legal convention fail, but that the opposition between conventionalists and natural rights theorists is outmoded. In doing this, the essay draws on recent literature in evolutionary biology and psychology. Even though modern property in a complex society involves legal conventions, those conventions should be sensitive to our natural dispositions concerning ownership.

Justifications for state authority are typically directed towards the good of those subject to that authority. But, because of their territorial nature, states exercise coercion not only towards insiders but also towards non-members. Such coercion can take the form of denying outsiders the right to enter a territory or to settle in it permanently, as well as various restraints on trade and association. When coercion is directed at insiders, it often comes packaged with various claims about distributive justice, including claims to the effect that being subject to coercion entitles citizens to certain distributive guarantees (social minimum, difference principle). This paper asks three questions: can states acquire the moral right to coerce non-citizens (including in the form of a denial of the right to traverse or enter territory)? are outsiders ever morally bound to submit to the commands of states along these lines? does the right coercively to exclude outsiders bring with it any distributive obligations similar to those entailed by the state’s subjection of co-citizens? The possibility that a right to exclude must be coupled with a duty of compensation to those excluded will be canvassed.